Singing with Strings
Renaissance Singers
Cathedral of the Holy Spirit
Saturday, May 22
Reviewed by Judith Lacy
Tom, Dick and Harry have been messing about since at least 1657. I'd never heard of a female equivalent before until I read - and heard the Renaissance Singers sing - Janet Frame's poem Poets.
The auditioned choir sang The Poet: A Song Cycle to open their first concert of the year. Jenny McLeod has set 11 of Frame's poems to music for chamber choir and string quartet.
O Tom Dick and Harry
Mabel Mildred and Cora,
Frame wrote as she examined the life of the poet.
The poem was published in The Pocket Mirror, the only volume of poetry published during her lifetime. Frame continues the life of a poet theme in The Poet, and Poets, also part of A Song Circle.
Young dead poets are prized comets.
The critics queue with their empty wagons ready for hitching.
It was delightful to hear Frame's words amplified in Palmerston North's only cathedral and not far from where Frame lived in the mid-1990s.
The string quartet of Nathan Pinkney (violin), Hayden Nickel (violin), Sylvia Neild (viola) and Joanna Dann (cello) were a marvel. While young, they are not the string musicians you need to smile politely at, then hurriedly make your excuses to give your ears a break from the screeching.
Neild already has a music degree and the other three are studying towards one. Samoan Nickel would like to see more Pasifika and Māori faces in the classical scene in New Zealand. This is a goal I'd never thought about before but it's one that has stayed with me.
The quartet got to shine with the second and first movements of American by Anton Dvorak. It was like being in a warm bath in a hotel with a good book.
The concert programme is beautifully presented and I love how the words of the poems are printed for you to follow, as well as the names of all the Renaissance Singers.
The second half brought some welcome variety to the programme. The choir beautifully controlled their singing in As One is One, while I'm sure if Maud, the subject of W B Yeats' unrequited love, heard the performance of He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, she would have had a change of heart.
I'd be interested to know how the two female members of the quartet felt wearing sleeveless dresses, while the male members and the choir all had long sleeves. It smacked of outdated notions of suitable attire for formal wear.
At the interval my friend asked if I'd noticed the singer who kept swaying. I hadn't, but after she pointed it out I couldn't keep my eyes off the woman. Besides this one blemish the choir performed as one.
I appreciated conductor Christine Archer-Lockwood's introductory comments to each piece - informative, succinct and not patronising.
Thank you Renaissance Singers for the invitation to write a review with less concern on the technical aspects of the concert and more on the way it moved me. I found it educational, relaxing and entertaining.
Renaissance is French for rebirth, but I'd encourage anyone who hasn't been to a Renaissance Singers concert to give birth to trying something new. Forget notions this music is for older, well off, white people. As Frame wrote in her poem Prejudice, "escape from the bathwater oceans of ideas that have got too dirty and too deep".